By Nina Siegal

New York Times

AMSTERDAM >> Europe has more than its share of angry anti-immigrant political parties these days. But one party has turned the politics of immigration on its head, positioning itself as perhaps the first in Europe with a pro-immigrant stance, run by people from immigrant backgrounds.

That party, called Denk, or Think, is led by a multicultural group of candidates seeking to combat xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands.

Denk has promoted itself as a kind of answer to the nativist and isolationist positions of flamboyant far-right populist candidate Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party, which has been surging in the polls.

“What is unique about Denk is that it’s a party of people with a migration background who completely control the party,” said Cas Mudde, a specialist in European political and radical parties who was born in the Netherlands.

“Nonwhites have been in Parliament for a long time, but all the parties are still dominated by white Dutch people,” added Mudde, an associate professor at the School for Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. “We haven’t had a party dominated by nonwhite Dutch that has a potential chance of getting elected into Parliament.”

The Denk party has proved contentious. It has been greeted with skepticism by its political opponents and criticism in the Dutch media. Denk was accused in the local Amsterdam centrist newspaper, Het Parool, of “fanning flames of immigrant discontent.” On social media, the party has been called “Netherlands haters.”

Among the Denk party’s stated policy goals are banning from legislative forums a pejorative term often used for Dutch nonwhites, “allochtoon,” and to replace the term “integration” with “acceptance.”

It wants to establish a “racism register” to track the use of hate speech by elected officials and to bar those who promote racism from holding public office.

It also promotes the building of a Dutch slavery museum, and it hopes to abolish the black minstrel character called Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, who appears in Dutch winter holiday celebrations with Sinterklaas, or a kind of Dutch Santa Claus.

Denk was founded in 2014 when two members of the Labor party who have Turkish origins, Tunahan Kuzu and Selcuk Ozturk, left Labor in a dispute over surveillance of Muslims. They continue to hold seats in Parliament and will do so until elections in 2017.

The Denk party has broken the threshold of 1,000 members, making it eligible for about 165,000 euros ($183,000) a year in state subsidies.

The biggest lift to the party’s profile came in May, when Dutch TV host Sylvana Simons, a dancer and singer born in Suriname, announced that she was joining the Denk party campaign for seats in Parliament. In televised interviews, she said she joined because she felt racism had taken on “dangerous” levels in the Netherlands, which she also said was “in denial” about its colonial legacy and its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Her announcement elicited such intensely negative responses on social media — 40,000 racist insults, according to her count — that the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, took time in one of his weekly addresses to condemn what he called “repulsive” statements by “idiots.”

In response to its critics, Denk has gone on the offensive, using its website’s TV channel to tell its supporters to distrust the media. Ozturk has proposed that journalists be forced to take an oath before being allowed to practice their profession.

Maul said party leaders declined to be interviewed unless they had the opportunity to authorize their comments before publication, which The New York Times does not do.

Some polls show that the party is likely to win two or three seats in the next elections, but others show it gaining only one seat at most.

“There have been other populist, pro-migrant parties that have so far not been successful,” said Lars Rensmann, a professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, who studies European political parties, including right-wing extremist and populist parties.

“This Denk party is much more modern, much smarter in the way they mobilize members,” he said, “and they have the potential to be electorally successful, which other parties of this sort have not yet.”

Many on the left worry that any gains for Denk will come at the expense of the more mainstream Labor Party.

Ahmed Marcouch, a Dutch member of Parliament in the Labor Party who was born in Morocco and has lived in the Netherlands since 1979, fears that Denk will only exacerbate divisions in Dutch society along ethnic lines.

“Our view in the Labor Party is that we want to create a society with all the people together, without it being important where you’re from,” he said.

But there are those who feel that Labor has done little to promote the interests of minority groups.

“They have struck a chord with people who feel there’s no voice in Parliament that speaks on their behalf on the crucial issues of Islamophobia and racism,” said Sandew Hira, director of the International Institute for Scientific Research, which is based in The Hague and conducts research on identity formation and colonialism.

“The identification that people have of Denk is not that they are ethnic candidates, like they would have been if they were still in the Labor Party,” he added. “But they are an ethnic voice that takes up the struggle and the demands of the communities of the people of color.”

Denk has resonated with people like Jerry Afriyie, a poet who was born in Ghana and grew up in the Netherlands. He is the founder of Nederland Wordt Beter, or The Netherlands Will Be Better, a grass-roots activist group that espouses some of the politics of the Black Lives Matter movement. It has also staged demonstrations against Black Pete.

“At least you have a political party that is using the words ‘institutional racism,’” he said. “We are living in a country where white supremacy is alive, it has always been alive, and it is getting louder. We have to respond to that.”

He and many others he knew would support the Denk party next year, he said, because “Denk is the best answer we have now.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company